RVB: Hello everyone. My name is Rik and here we are again,
recording another episode of our Neo4j graph database podcast. And today, we're
doing another remote session with Jean Villedieu from Linkurious. Jean is in France today. I'm here
in cloudy Antwerp. Welcome Jean.

JV: Hello Rik. Thank you very much for inviting me to the
podcast.

RVB: Absolutely. Yeah. It's great. So Jean, like always, we
have three parts in this podcast and I'd really like you to introduce yourself
a little bit to our listeners.

JV: Sure. My name is Jean Villedieu and I am one of the
co-founders of Linkurious. At Linkurious,
I'm in charge of sales and marketing and Linkurious
is a French startup, based in Paris. Founded three years ago and we specialize
in graph visualization. What that means is that we have software that runs on
top of Neo4j and that provides Neo4j users a nice interface with which they can
browse their data, explore it visually and extract information that's within
their graph.

RVB: So Linkurious is a product that people can buy, right?

JV: Exactly. You can visit the website at http://linkurio.us where you can find more
information about our products, and you can buy and download it.

RVB: But it's also an open source part as I understand it,
right? There's a part of it that's open source?

JV: Actually, it's a good question. We recently released Linkurious.js, a graph
visualization library, and it has a dual license with a open source license and
a commercial one. You can find more information about that on Github and on a website
which is actually going to be updated in a few days or weeks.

RVB: Super. Well, like any open source tool, it's great that
you can explore it and have the community look at the internals but at the same
time, there needs to be business model for it to survive right? So, we're on
the same page there.

RVB: Jean, really the next question for me is, what
attracted you guys to graphs? Why do you love graphs so much and how did you
get into it? Could you give us a little bit more insight there?

JV: Sure. So, I co-founded Linkurious
with Sebastien Heymann. I'm going to talk a
little bit about him and then I'll talk about myself. Sebastien has a long love
story with graphs. I think he started a project called Gephi, about six or seven years ago. It's
open source graph visualization program.

RVB: That's very well-known and Gephi's, everyone uses
Gephi.

JV: Yeah, and I think he's been in love with graphs ever
since. For me it has been more recent I'd say. During my studies I started
using Gephi for competitive analysis reasons. I really loved it because I
thought it was powerful, it was a completely new way for me to understand data,
and at the same time it was very beautiful. It was very exciting to--

RVB: Beautiful is good …

JV: Exactly, that's-- I'm not ashamed of that, it's one of
the things that attracted me to graph, and graph visualization in the first
days, and it's still something that I find exciting. I started diving into
Gephi and graph visualization. I thought it was very interesting, and then I
met Sebastien and had the opportunity to start Linkurio.us.
Ever since, what had been very fascinating with the ongoing work at Linkurio.us, is that we get to interact with
people who are innovators working with data in new ways to solve various
problems in the field of financial services. In the field of security in
general, in the field of health, and we get to play a very modest part in that
journey by helping them understand their data and--

RVB: What's the most exciting case that you've had in the
past couple of years? Can you give us one example maybe?

JV: Sure, something that was very interesting for us was
working with the ICIJ. It's a conglomerate
of data journalist and they used Neo4j and Linkurious to explore the data from
HSBC and work on important very large scale tax fraud scheme or arranged tax
fraud scheme.

RVB: Is that the case that was in the news a couple of weeks
ago?

JV: Yeah exactly.

RVB: Oh. Wow.

JV: And that has been discovered by combination of Neo4j and
Linkurious.

RVB: Super. I was always thinking that I could use
visualizations to find new beers but you can do more than that …

RVB: We'll switch to the next and the last question. Where
do you think this is going in the next couple of years? Where is the graph
space, graph data space going but also where is Linkurio.us
going in the next couple of years, could you help us there a little bit?

JV: Sure, I think graphs will still be a niche, compared to
relational data basis in general, but it's a very quickly growing niche, and
it's going to be very important for companies working with large volumes of
data, within that more and more people are going to be interacting with graphs.
It's going to be something very common in the business world and we're excited
to see a new cases, new applications, almost on a daily basis. So there's
bright future for graph technologies. And as a small company Linkurio.us intends to play our part in
democratizing graph technologies, by offering the solution that business people
- everyday business people - will use to understand their graph data. We want
to be the reference for that.

RVB: That's super. Thank you so much. It was a great talk.
We're going to wrap up now. We want to keep this podcast short, and sweet.
Thank you-- thanks a lot. If people want to know more about either Neo4j or Linkurio.us
you can go to Neo4j.com or linkurio.us. Thank you again, Jean, and I look
forward to speaking to you soon again.